Kitty Ussher: I mentioned in response to the earlier question that 14 reviews were being fast-tracked. Cambridge is one of those and I expect to have recommendations about what should change, in anything, in the next few weeks. Any changes will, we hope, be implemented from 1 July.

James Purnell: It is very important for us to provide people with help to get back into work, and to improve the incentives for getting back into work. That is why we are re-testing everybody on incapacity benefit to make sure that they are on the right benefit. That is why we have tightened the gateway to make sure that only the right people get on to the benefit, and that is why we will require everybody for whom it is appropriate to have back-to-work support. The one thing that we will not do is abolish the minimum wage, to which I think he is referring. He is the promoter of a Bill on the issue, which will come before the House on Friday. I hope that everyone, including Conservative Front Benchers, will oppose it, and make it clear that that is not the way that we should go.

John Mann: Does the Minister have any estimate of how many of the figures for the UK relate to Eddie Stobart Ltd? That company has been abusing the TUPE legislation across the country to make large numbers of people redundant in small groups. It has failed to consult properly or pay for proper consultancy, including in my own constituency.

Tony McNulty: I am afraid that the hon. Gentleman's starting premise is entirely wrong. We are deliberately ensuring that the almost £5 billion we are investing in Jobcentre Plus and employment opportunities goes across the piece. It is helping before redundancies, with our rapid response services. It is helping people who, unfortunately, find themselves unemployed and for whom the experience is brand new. It is helping people through the more enhanced packages for those with three months' unemployment, six months' unemployment—packages to which all long-term unemployed people will be referred from June and October and beyond—and 12 months' unemployment.
	The hon. Gentleman is quite right to imply that we have had to adjust things. After 10, 11 or 12 very fruitful years in terms of the labour market and employment, when the focus has been on the longer-term unemployed, we have had to bring much of that support forward to much earlier in the process. That is precisely what is happening. There is no reason at all to suggest that the FND will be introduced at any time other than in October, as planned.

Peter Bone: Unemployment in Wellingborough, unfortunately, is more than two-thirds higher now than it was under the last Conservative Government. I wondered whether that was unique, so I checked. On average, in all Conservative-held constituencies in the country, unemployment is higher now under Labour than it was under the Conservatives. Does the Minister agree that Labour still is not working?

Tony McNulty: No, and nor I would agree with the hon. Gentleman's support—I have not heard that he feels otherwise—for those Conservative Front Benchers who do not support the £5 billion package that will help in his area, as it will elsewhere. I certainly would not agree with him, given that he is, I think, a signatory to the outrageous little Bill that will seek to abolish the national minimum wage this Friday.

Andrew MacKay: Will the Minister accept that, when I was manning a stall in Bracknell town centre recently and asking people to sign a petition on pensioner poverty, a large number of pensioners asked me why the Chancellor had not zero-rated or stopped taxing their unearned income, given that they were on the basic rate of tax? I could not answer that, and I cannot believe that he has not done so. Perhaps the Minister would like to explain why that has not happened.

James Purnell: I am sure that they will. As the Minister for Employment and Welfare Reform, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. McNulty) mentioned, the Conservative chair of the Local Government Association has strongly welcomed this scheme, and I urge all Members to work with local authorities, charities and social enterprises to bid for the future jobs fund, to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, when a generation was left on the scrap heap. Instead, we can guarantee to find young people work or training within a year, and hopefully much faster than that.

Jonathan R Shaw: I thank my hon. Friend for raising the issue of carers. He will be aware that the Government are investing more than £255 million to support carers in the short term. That includes £150 million to allow carers to have planned breaks, £38 million from my Department to help carers re-enter the job market and, importantly, £6 million from the Department for Children, Schools and Families to support young carers in the work they do. We have set out our carers' strategy and are looking at reforming the benefit system, so as to avoid some of the complexities that carers complain about.

Rosie Winterton: When we came into power, we said we would make the system for claiming extra benefits simpler. If the hon. Gentleman wants to abolish means-testing altogether, that will, of course, benefit the wealthiest people more. What we have done is to target money on the most vulnerable people. As I have said, overall, £96 billion more has been spent on pensioners under this Government, but we what we have not done is to take away means-testing entirely, because that would have the greatest effect on the poorest people in our society.

Tony McNulty: All that is rooted in precisely what we are doing with the £5 billion of extra investment. As I said earlier, we have had to change the model slightly to offer much, much more—both pre-redundancy with the rapid response service and when a person is first made unemployed, and then again after three and six months of unemployment. However, the hon. Lady has made a fair point, and I take it seriously. Given the present downturn, we are ensuring that Jobcentre Plus is learning all the time, and that it treats people differently if, for instance, they have a history of 15 of 20 years' successful employment or come from backgrounds or professions that make them unaccustomed to using its services.

Harriet Harman: I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
	For us, equality matters because it is right as a question of principle, and it is necessary as a matter of practice. It is essential for every individual. Everyone has the right to be treated fairly, and everyone should enjoy the opportunity to fulfil their potential. No one should suffer the indignity of discrimination—to be told, "You're old, so you're past it," overlooked because of a disability or excluded because of the colour of their skin, or to face harassment because they are gay or be paid unfairly because they are a woman.
	Equality is not just the birthright of every individual; it is also necessary for the economy: a competitive economy is one that draws on everyone's talents and abilities and is not blinkered by prejudice. It is also necessary for society: a more equal society is more cohesive and at ease with itself than one marred by prejudice and discrimination. So this Labour Government are, like other Labour Governments before us, a champion of equality.
	The Bill is not about turning back the clock—quite the opposite: it is looking to the future. It is backward societies that are marred by discrimination against lesbians and gay men, where women are expected to know their place and which are bound by rigid hierarchies. It is the modern and open society that can look to the future with confidence.
	The point about a meritocracy is that only if we have fairness and equality will people really be considered on their individual merits, free from discrimination and unfairness. So this is not an argument against a meritocracy—quite the reverse: fairness and equality are necessary to underpin a meritocracy.

Harriet Harman: I will get to the points about positive discrimination and positive action further on in my speech—[Hon. Members: "Ah."]—if Members will bear with me.  [ Interruption. ] Yes, the Bill includes positive action.
	The Bill is in the great tradition of Labour Governments. The first equality laws were brought in by a Labour Government more than 40 years ago. First, in the 1960s came the pioneering race laws and then in the 1970s there were new laws on equal pay and sex discrimination. Then nothing was initiated by the Tory Government for 18 years. Then Labour returned to office and introduced a range of new laws—from recognising gay and lesbian partnerships, to protecting older people from discrimination at work.
	Although progress has been made, the job is not yet done. While the most blatant forms of discrimination are just distant memories, inequality and discrimination persist, so we need the Equality Bill and the related action that I will outline to the House today to build on what we have already done. I shall now turn to the Bill's provisions.
	We have made it easier for women who work, as with more child care and longer maternity leave, for example, but there is still entrenched pay discrimination. Despite women forming half the work force, men still earn on average 22 per cent. an hour more than women. We do not accept that that is because women work 22 per cent. less hard or are 22 per cent. less intelligent or 22 per cent. less qualified than men. It is pay discrimination, which is mostly a legacy of the idea that a woman's job is less important than a man's, because her main role is in the home. Although the lion's share—

Tom Clarke: I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. On the subject of disability, has she had time to reflect on the views of Mencap and others about people with learning disabilities? Some 65 per cent. of them want to work but only 17 per cent. get the opportunity to do so, as against 49 per cent. of other disabled people and 74 per cent. of the general population. Does she agree that we should recognise that problem in legislation?

Theresa May: No, I did say that I was going to make some progress, and I am aware that many Members wish to speak. Moreover, the Leader of the House and Minister for Women and Equality said that her speech would be long—and, indeed, it was.
	Equality of opportunity in the workplace is something on which I have campaigned for some time, particularly the gender pay gap. The Conservative party put forward proposals to tackle that gender pay gap more than a year ago, and my colleague in the other place, Baroness Morris of Bolton, has a private Member's Bill in progress now. After the comments made in the other place when that Bill was debated, I was hopeful that this Equality Bill would include our proposals to address the gender pay gap, which would mean that we could work with the Government. Sadly, however, the proposals in this Bill are clumsy and ill judged. In four years' time, the Government will have the power to demand that every private sector company with more than 250 employees carry out a compulsory pay audit, regardless of whether or not it has a record of discrimination.
	By the way, there is clearly one law for the public sector and another for the private sector. There are no provisions in the Bill that would have a similar effect on public sector bodies, even though the pay gap in the public sector is far from satisfactory. Our own policy, the Conservative party policy, would compel only companies found guilty of discrimination by an employment tribunal to carry out a pay audit—a punishment for those that have offended and a deterrent for those that might. Our proposal is fair and measured; the Government's is heavy handed and obstinate.
	The Leader of the House and Minister for Women said last week:
	"Fair employers have nothing to fear but unfair employers have nowhere to hide."
	I have to say to her that it seems she does not understand her own policy, because her proposals would do exactly the reverse of what she said—fair employers will have to bear just as much cost and inconvenience as unfair employers, and the result will be a bureaucratic nightmare that will set back the equal pay campaign. I think that this proposal shows the Minister's complete lack of empathy for the situation in which many businesses find themselves. Adding another burden that will be costly and time consuming when many are struggling to stay afloat and keep people in jobs at all is completely insensitive. Even the Business Minister, the noble Baroness Vadera, has warned businesses not to be distracted by the Equality Bill, so I suggest that she, too, does not feel entirely comfortable with its proposals.

Theresa May: The hon. Gentleman's interpretation of what I said is not entirely accurate. What I want is a change in the equal pay legislation which is proportionate and requires companies that have been found guilty of discrimination to undergo a compulsory pay audit, which I believe will serve as a punishment for those who are found guilty and as a deterrent for those who may consider discrimination.

Theresa May: I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. They are, indeed, two very good candidates, and I am sure they will make a very positive contribution to this House when they are elected.
	On positive action, I must say that there seems to be a discrepancy between what the Leader of the House has said in public and what the Bill was originally supposed to do. One example that is often given on the wider issue of positive action and its use is that in circumstances where a primary school that has only female teachers has a job vacancy for which there are two candidates of equal merit, one of whom is a man and the other a woman, the head teacher or school governors could be allowed to appoint the man in order to address the imbalance in the work force. That must only be allowed as a tie-breaker in situations where there are two genuinely equally qualified candidates. In such circumstances, I would be happy to support the proposal to allow companies to take into account the diversity of a work force when making appointments, so long as that applied only where there are two candidates of equal merit—although I suspect that it might be hard to find many circumstances in which the candidates were genuinely absolutely equally qualified. But this is not the approach that the right hon. and learned Lady has been taking when explaining the proposal, because last week we learned that she wants to use it to pack the boards of nationalised banks with women, saying:
	"It is about saying, 'because you are a woman I'm going to put you in this promotion'."
	That is precisely what this proposal should not be about. The right hon. and learned Lady has given the impression that this proposal will allow widespread positive discrimination, and if that is the effect, then we oppose it. Indeed, the explanatory notes to the Bill, prepared by the Government Equalities Office, state that this proposal might allow a police service to give preferential selection to candidates from an ethnic minority where there are
	"a number of equally qualified candidates".
	I am not sure that there would ever be a situation where there are "a number" of genuinely equally qualified candidates, but the note continues:
	"This would not be unlawful, provided the comparative merits of other candidates were also taken into consideration."
	Taking into consideration the merits of other candidates is not the same as allowing positive action only when there are two candidates of equal merit. The Government therefore seem to be confused about this proposal: either it is a limited measure to be used only as a tie-break in rare cases, or it will allow positive discrimination as a widespread recruitment policy. We therefore intend to examine this proposal further in Committee.
	We also need more detail on the proposals relating to public sector procurement. I understand the Government's intention in this area, but the Bill is, again, worryingly vague. What exactly will be required of a company in order to demonstrate that it is meeting acceptable equality levels? Indeed, how are acceptable equality levels to be defined, and who will define them? We all agree that there needs to be fairness in the business world and that the public sector should always take care in procurement, but as the Government have spent so much time preparing the Bill, we expected more detail. Given the concerns raised by the Glover review about small businesses and procurement, we need to ensure that an appropriate balance is struck so that equality flourishes in our business sector, but without placing unfair burdens on small companies.
	I welcome the inclusion in the Bill of age discrimination measures. Unfair discrimination on the basis of age should be as unacceptable as any other form of discrimination and we welcome the action to tackle it. However, I want to press the Government on a few points to ensure that there are no unintended consequences of the legislation. We all want to tackle age discrimination, but I am sure Members would accept that
	"there will always be a need for age-specific facilities and services".
	Those were the exact words of the Government's discrimination law review and that principle is maintained by the Government's correct decision to exclude under-18s from the age provisions of this Bill. The Leader of the House will be aware that there is concern that the Government have ignored that principle, particularly as regards insurance.
	The discrimination law review stated that there was a need for the continuation of
	"age-based concessions, whether in the private or public sector"
	as well as a need to allow
	"insurance companies to design and provide products for specific market segments"
	and
	"age limits on group holidays."
	Ministers have been challenged on the issue of Saga Holidays by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) and the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy). Ministers have recognised these issues in the explanatory notes, but they have failed to have come up with a satisfactory way of dealing with these issues in the Bill. What they have had to resort to in clause 190 is an unacceptable power for Ministers to amend primary legislation by order every time someone thinks up an example that Ministers want to permit. That will not be acceptable for businesses such as Saga and for other insurance businesses that need more clarity about the framework in which they are going to operate.
	Although one of the understandable desires of the Government is to open up services for older people, there is a danger that the clause will damage the specialist services on which older people rely, in particular insurance services and specialist holidays, by requiring them to provide for younger people as well. Saga has said the following about the Bill:
	"our insurance business, if forced to offer premiums to all age groups, would become less competitive for the over 50s because we would have to bear extra costs of quotation for the under 50s."
	It says that without assurances from the Government, the following will occur:
	"This will inevitably make business planning impossible for us, since we will not know whether our holidays will remain legal."
	I am sure that the Government do not intend to damage specialist services in that way, but they must listen to the genuine concerns that have been expressed. Equally, they must ensure that insurance companies that use age assessment—where that is appropriate—are not damaged. The Government have failed to set out clearly where they are coming from on this, so I hope that when the Solicitor-General winds up the debate she will be able to assure us that age-based treatment, where appropriate, can continue.
	I am glad that the Bill is bringing under one roof the vast array of existing equalities legislation, so that we have more coherence in this area of law. Over recent years, equality has been given a bad name—to many people, "equality" has become about bureaucracy and box-ticking—but it should never be the enemy of common sense, nor should it hamper business; it should help business to work better.

Patricia Hewitt: I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman. I do not think there would be much disagreement in any part of the House. We carefully considered that in setting up the single Equality Commission, and I know that the Commission takes it extremely seriously.

Patricia Hewitt: I disagree with the hon. Lady on that point for the reasons so eloquently expressed by the Leader of the House. The point that I wanted to make about the right to request flexible working and, more broadly, work-family balance is that the new challenge we face is how employers can make it much easier and more normal for men to vary their working hours so that they can play the full part in bringing up their children, or caring for elderly or disabled relatives, that so many would like to play but find difficult to achieve at the moment.
	I especially welcome certain aspects of the Bill. The new public sector duty is part of a very welcome simplification of the law. The Leader of the House, in illustrating the need for simplification, could have mentioned the appalling number of volumes now required to deal with case law on all the different strands of legislation. Having a single public sector equality duty, rather than a series of separate duties, will allow the Department of Health—my old Department—and the NHS to take a single view of the challenges they face and the opportunities they have to combat inequality. For instance, Departments could look at the real challenge they still face in achieving the proper representation of women in more senior positions. They might consider advertising almost all jobs on a flexible rather than a full-time basis—a suggestion specifically made by Working Families.
	I equally strongly support the Leader of the House on the measures on positive action. Clarity is badly needed in that area. When I was a governor of my children's primary school, we found it almost impossible to recruit men into the classrooms, even though we badly wanted more men to teach those young children, especially in a community in which so many children were growing up without the active presence of their father in their family.
	I hope that Bill will permit positive action not only at the point of making an appointment, but will also allow it when a public sector body or private company—seeking greater diversity in its work force or on its board—solicits applications from well qualified people within the underrepresented group. Perhaps the Minister will address that point when she winds up.
	The third aspect that I warmly welcome is the proposed new duty on public sector organisations to consider how they can narrow the gap between rich and poor. I referred to the work I had done as Minister for Women and as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in making proposals for a single Equality and Human Rights Commission. In the end, the factor that most led me to the conclusion that we needed a single body was the fact that—whatever the actual legal position—some groups felt completely left out of the law and the debate on diversity and equality. In particular, white men—especially white working class men—simply did not see themselves represented or reflected in the equality and diversity debate. Yet we all know very well—I certainly know this from my constituency—that school results, for example, show that white working-class boys are typically most likely to leave school without anything resembling the skills and competences that they need to open up opportunities in the modern world.
	What I have also seen in my constituency and many other parts of the country is the powerful change that can come about when the Government and the public sector more generally get behind disadvantaged communities, as we have done, for instance, with the new deal for communities, certainly in my constituency, in the neighbourhood of Braunstone, where the public, private and not-for-profit sectors have come together to support local people in a desperately disadvantaged neighbourhood, to start to transform their own lives and their neighbours' lives.
	I have no doubt at all that local councils, the local NHS, the police and so on will be helped in focusing their priorities by the new duty to consider how they can narrow the class gap, as well as taking into account the different needs of, for instance, men and women and of—to use another Leicester example—the south Asian community in respect of health care and so on. That is crucial. If that is one of the main reasons behind the Opposition's decision to oppose the Bill on Second Reading, it illustrates just how out of touch they are.

Patricia Hewitt: My hon. Friend is absolutely right—in fact, I recall getting some sense of the work of that local strategic partnership when I visited her constituency—about the concerted effort that is needed over a long period to address such deep-seated disadvantages, which are transmitted intergenerationally within extended families in a neighbourhood.
	I want to raise two specific, more narrow issues, on which I hope my hon. and learned Friend the Minister will comment when she makes her winding-up speech. The first issue is discrimination against women who are pregnant or on maternity leave. It is truly shocking 30 years, or whatever it is, since the introduction of paid maternity leave that so many women still find themselves discriminated against by their employer when they are pregnant or on maternity leave. That includes utterly crass forms of discrimination, such as the woman who telephones or tells her employer that she is pregnant only to be told, practically in the next breath, that she has lost her job. The alliance against pregnancy discrimination has expressed concerns that clauses 16 and 17 will not be as strong as the existing law, and it would be helpful if my hon. and learned Friend reassured us on that point.

Patricia Hewitt: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her support, because she has done outstanding work on the issue.
	On the second issue, I want to return to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) about caste discrimination, because it is certainly the belief of Caste Watch UK that the current law does not adequately protect those in the south Asian or, indeed, other communities who find themselves discriminated against on those grounds. I understand that the UN human rights convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination prohibits discrimination on five grounds: race, colour, national or ethnic origin, or descent. Of course, the UK ratified the convention in 1969, but I do not believe that our existing law, or indeed the Bill, is as explicit on that point as, for instance, the legislation in Australia. It would be helpful if the Minister addressed that issue.
	The Bill is a landmark measure and it deserves the wholehearted support of the House. I certainly wish it well in Committee. I believe that in years to come it will be seen as another milestone on our long march to a fairer and more equal society.

Lynne Featherstone: The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. We Liberal Democrats are trying hard to support the measures in the Bill, but it is hard to see the legislation going through its stages without the detail that we need to be sure that we are doing the right thing. These are uncertain political times, and it causes me concern that future Ministers might be anti-equality. Powers left to a Minister in future will be powers for a Minister to undo what has been done today, if they should, by any chance, not share an equal conviction in the equality legislation.
	Socio-economic inequality is the deepest and most intractable inequality. That is the one into which we are born, and we have very little chance of changing that. The Liberal Democrats have long argued, in this Chamber and elsewhere, that poverty and inequality are intrinsically linked. In nearly three decades of Thatcherite and new Labour Governments, Britain has steadily become a less equal and less fair society. Under this Labour Government, rates of social mobility have fallen. A person born into a poor family now is more likely to remain poor throughout their adult life than a person born 30 years ago. Educational chances are almost entirely correlated to social class, which means that children's prospects are set before they even reach school.
	The equality gap has widened, and as Ms Polly Toynbee wrote last week:
	"in Labour's decade, billionaires' wealth quadrupled and three out of five of them paid no income tax."
	Even more importantly, in the five years before the crash, average incomes barely changed, and the poor became poorer. Inequality is at its highest level since records began—and that is under a Labour Government. The Government should have introduced measures to tackle stubborn, worsening inequality 10 years ago, and they should not have done so in a last-minute, throwaway clause, even though it has been put at the start of the Bill. It muddies the water; it has been jumbled into a Bill that was intended to unify, clarify and strengthen existing legislation.
	The Government should have made legislative proposals to tackle socio-economic inequality in a Bill of its own, given the vital importance of narrowing the equality gap. It is the right aim, but the wrong vehicle and the wrong means. It is just a very weak measure. In some ways, the proposal in the Bill is no different from saying that when our taxes are spent by public bodies, those bodies should bear in mind whether they are damaging our environment in how they spend those taxes. It makes sense to think about the wider implications of how money should be spent. If we can use it to address and tackle more than one issue, and to achieve more than one goal, that is even better news, as it is more value for money in cash-strapped times, but the way in which the duty is laid out in the Bill is, I fear, simplistic and unfair. Its wording is broad enough to attract controversy, worry, and legal argument, but too weak to have much of a real impact or really address the equality gap, which is widening and damaging to all of us. That is the worst of all words.
	I cannot express how disappointed I am with the Government's overly patient approach to equal pay for women. I know that their heart is in the right place, but the idea that business is to be given another four years in which to change its ways is a cop-out. It would seem that the Minister for Women and Equality has forgotten that businesses were given five years to get their house in order after the original Equal Pay Act of 1970. Forty years later, we are about to repeat that same error. How much time do businesses need to get their house in order? I am sorry that the Government have backed away from mandatory pay audits. What the Government propose is not a pay audit at all, but simply a statement of average pay by gender, without any context to make it truly meaningful. My goodness, the Government clearly understand the benefits of openness and transparency, because they rightly seek to end the mystery that shrouds pay by prohibiting firms from issuing gagging orders that require a vow of silence from their staff. However, they fall short of requiring a real pay audit that would evaluate the quality and nature of the work being done and then be published.
	Recently, off the back of a publication about pay at the University of Cambridge, I noticed an unhealthy preponderance of men at the top of the scales and women at the bottom. I referred the issue to the Equality and Human Rights Commission and blogged about it, and two very concerned gentleman from the university's external relations department rushed down to Parliament to meet me and inform me of all that they were going to do to deal with that glaring challenge—exposed by meaningful figures that they had had to publish. That is the point: what is exposed to public scrutiny will concentrate the mind. The main benefit of such an audit, however, is that it becomes a tool for the individual who has no idea what the pay scales are and who gets what. In seeing what is what, the individual will be able to decide whether she or he is being discriminated against, and they will have the evidence and knowledge to take their case forward.
	Conservative Members discussed the knock-on effect on a whole company, but how will an individual take forward a case to be examined by a tribunal in the first place if they do not have the evidence? The Government's hand may be forced if businesses do not change their ways, but the Bill deals only with those private sector firms that have 250 staff or more, representing 0.5 per cent. of the whole sector. As the Leader of the House pointed out, 80 per cent. of people work in the private sector, so the Bill is unlikely to right many of the wrongs ensuring that, economically, women continue to be second-class citizens.
	Moreover, the Government's plan seems to require the Equality and Human Rights Commission to spend the summer consulting various bodies, but it is a bit rich for the commission to consider it after legislation has gone through the House, because we will have no idea of extent of the measure. We are also disappointed that, on legal protection against pay discrimination, the Government have not introduced hypothetical comparators for equal pay claims, because that continues the disparity between the way in which different types of discrimination are dealt with. We will therefore push the Government in Committee to have the courage of their convictions.
	Much of the Bill deals with when one is in work, but I am concerned about the discrimination that takes place in respect of applications for work, because, even before the interview stage, there are barriers that eliminate those people from black or ethnic minority communities, women, those with disabilities and older applicants. Applicants must be given an equal chance of employment from the first moment that they apply for a job, whether private or public.
	I once had two interns, one whose surname was Patel and one whose surname was Hussein. They were bright, able and talented, but, out of the many jobs that they had applied for before they came to work as interns, they had not qualified for a single interview. Obviously, after interning for a while in my office and being able to put on their CV that they had worked for an MP, which is, after all, the point for them, they both went off to good jobs, I am pleased to say—one in public relations and one at the Ministry of Defence. However, the situation got me thinking—it is not rocket science—that they might not have got past that first, application stage because of their surnames.
	Nicola Brewer, the outgoing chief executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, gave voice not long ago to the fact that employers avoid employing women because they wish to avoid becoming liable for maternity benefits. We will table an amendment to introduce a name-blank application that would apply to all written applications to work. Just as children are given an exam number to put on their exam papers so that there is no recognition, prejudice or unfairness, job applicants should be required to submit, for example, only their national insurance number. No one would know whether they were female, male, black, brown, young or old, and that first, possibly subliminal, discard would be eliminated. Obviously, when one reached the interview stage, the employer would know one's background, but prejudice would be much harder, and personality and character come through at interview in a way that they do not on a piece of paper. I hope that the Government will look favourably on that suggestion. Financially, the cost would be almost nil.

Julie Morgan: Yes. I thank my hon. and learned Friend for that intervention.
	One issue that young people complain about particular is inappropriate health care provision. Let me take this opportunity to welcome initiatives in my constituency, particularly the Skypad unit, which is based at the University hospital of Wales. It has special age-appropriate facilities for teenage cancer sufferers. The rooms are geared towards teenagers and there is a chill-out zone as well as computer games. That sort of development is exactly what we should be encouraging, because it is appropriate for the age of those young people. They are not children, and they are not adults, but in the health service in general about two thirds of those who are at that in-between age are not in appropriate accommodation. Those are the sorts of issues that have been brought to me by young people.
	Another point made to me by the Young Equals campaign in particular—I have met a lot of these groups—was that research has shown that children do not expect the police necessarily to take them seriously when they make serious points. Sometimes, groups of young people are not allowed access to leisure facilities and shops. A shop near my office allowed in only two young people at any one time. That is labelling all young people as potentially disruptive, and I wonder how young people who feel very deeply about such issues can be protected from such discrimination. How will such issues be addressed under the Bill? That is an important point, and I hope that we can have a further discussion so that it can become clear to young people, who often feel strongly about such issues, that the Government are considering their role.
	I want to mention other welcome provisions. Many of us have campaigned for a ban on discrimination in private clubs for years, and have even stood outside such clubs making our views known, so it is great that that is now happening. I also welcome the measures to protect pregnant women and new mothers, and to make it illegal to eject breastfeeding mothers from cafés, restaurants and public places—I know that that has happened. Many of us have suffered from such discrimination.
	The Bill will reinforce some of the good initiatives that are already happening. In Cardiff, there is a "Breastfeeding Welcome" scheme. Businesses put up a sign saying, "Breastfeeding mothers are welcome." The scheme has spread all over Cardiff and is particularly strong in the Cardiff Bay area, which is a tourist area. The Bill will strengthen the scheme. We can make the legislation, but we also need efforts to encourage women and to say, "We are pleased that you are breastfeeding here. We think that breastfeeding is good for you and good for the children and we want to do all we can to help you feel welcome." We have the legislation to back up that approach, but we still need the schemes to reinforce the message and to make people feel welcome.
	I congratulate the Government on this wide-ranging Bill, and I am sure that it will make a huge difference to individuals in this country. I want to conclude by mentioning one particular group. I am chair of the all-party group on Gypsy and Traveller law reform and I know that Gypsies and Travellers are among the most discriminated-against groups in this society. I hope that the Bill will help them to achieve their rightful place in society and that they will play a major future role in their communities with its help.

Tim Boswell: I am quite sure that there will be cost savings in the long run, and that the situation will settle down. There is a difficulty in the short term, however.
	I want to turn to public sector bodies. Even if we drop the argument that the pursuit, in one clause, of socio-economic equality amounts to socialism, as I have heard it described, it does provide a charter for politically motivated interference. In some cases, it could even threaten equality under the law. For example, should we wind up the public library service because it is allegedly used by middle class people rather than by the population as a whole? Worse, the public sector duty could become a cop-out from doing the real work that is needed in other parts of the public sector.
	In some respects, the public sector and the civil service, of which I have some knowledge, are good employers and meet many of the requirements in the Bill. I know a bit about job share in the civil service, for example. Nevertheless, there is still a gender pay gap in the public service. A recent issue of  Westminster & Whitehall World highlighted a problem in recruitment advertising that could deter a substantial amount of part-time applicants from applying for certain jobs—I think that the estimate was that 25 per cent. of jobs were not open to job sharers or part-timers. That would mean that many women with family responsibilities could not apply for those jobs. There also continues to be a lack of gender balance in public board appointments, although positive discrimination is perhaps not the right way to address the problem.
	Yet the Government are somehow exempting themselves from many of the duties relating to publishing information on the gender pay gap. Characteristically, however, they go on to impose mandatory gender pay audits across the private sector, not on a targeted basis, and such an imposition on hard-pressed businesses is particularly difficult in present circumstances.
	We also need to remember the social implications of the Bill. Not to put too fine a point on it, people will know that I do not go along with what is sometimes unfairly implied about the white working class. In a very interesting speech, the right hon. Member for Leicester, West (Ms Hewitt) spoke about the interests of the white working class. However, wherever we come from in this debate, we have to understand that there is a very fine line to tread between the social progress most of us—nearly everybody in this Chamber—would want and the risk of a backlash from grass-roots opinion. It is not always racist to protest if people feel that they are being treated unfairly because of a body of law or how it is interpreted; if that happens, we could have social unrest, particularly at a time of economic difficulty and unemployment.
	At the same time as the Bill focuses on one or two headline-catching initiatives, which are obviously part of the particular Minister's agenda, it does not go far enough or give a sufficient lead in other directions. In respect of the private sector, there is, of course, no direct lever that Parliament or Ministers can pull other than setting out particular legal provisions. In terms of example, however, I have always felt that the best results come from the private sector when the moral and social case for equality and inclusion coincides with the business case. I have shared platforms with the Institute of Directors and other such bodies and argued that that coincidence of interest is the best way of guaranteeing social progress.
	Employers need every sensible encouragement to good practice in equality. If one were to go into a bank in Leicester, it would hardly be surprising—or, to put it the other way, it would be extremely surprising if it did not happen—if one saw two or three Asian cashiers. Of course that will be the case, because that is the characteristic and make-up of the population.
	We do not have enough disabled prospective parliamentary candidates, but we are beginning to address the problem.
	In the public sector, there is also the question of principles and people debate whether the Bill should have a principles clause. I tend to agree with the Equality and Human Rights Commission that we should have such a clause. It is a "King Charles' Head" issue for me, so I was delighted that the Mental Capacity Act 2005 kept such a principles clause in, and I have drafted them for other Bills. I did not have much success with them, but I believe that there is a strength to having such clauses. I can understand exactly why Government lawyers are uncomfortable about principles-based laws; they think that they are somehow a foreign invention that could create a clash between specific requirements and wider principles of good behaviour. Actually, however, these clauses enable tribunals or courts of law to look behind the fulfilment of box-ticking and to move towards compliance with the underlying principles, meeting the challenges that the legislation is designed to address.
	We have seen similar sorts of problems with our own expenses, when MPs have said that they complied with the rules, but we all know that that is not a sufficient response. If we are going to make real social progress, whether it be in the private or the public sector, it does mean a change of culture and it means that people have to go the extra mile beyond what is specifically written down in the law.
	In truth, my personal vision of equality is, in a sense, motivated less by discrimination—I am not, however, a lawyer—than by an approach informed by human rights. I believe that employers should have to treat all their staff—and, of course, job applicants, too—decently. Equally, for those offering public services, we know that they are difficult to resource and to join up, but what should motivate all public officials is the offering of considerate, personal, holistic and decent treatment. Doing that properly in the interests of the person concerned should transcend the mere letter of the law. Passing this Bill, notwithstanding its many virtues, is at best a step towards that wider social advance.

Desmond Turner: I am happy that areas of disagreement can be debated, but that is different from throwing the whole Bill out, which is what the Conservative Opposition are suggesting. That seems to me to be a total negation of what the hon. Lady has just said. By all means let us fight in Committee on the all the issues that are worrying, but anyone seriously in favour of equality should back the Bill so that there is a vehicle in place to argue about. That seems to me to be simple logic, but I have problems understanding the Opposition.
	Although the Bill is, as I say, mainly a consolidation, it introduces some new principles and points, many of which are essentially philosophical. In bringing all equality strands into one Bill, it creates, if I may put it this way, an equality of inequalities. In other words, whatever the inequality is, "We're agin it, and we are agin it to the same degree." I think that that is an entirely healthy development of a kind that will lead to the cultural change that several Members have mentioned. That is what we really need at the end of the day. Yes, we set legal frameworks, and it is important to do so; but unless those legal frameworks end up creating a culture change in society or are met by such a change, the overall outcome will not be the one that we wish to see. I believe that the legal framework is at least one half of that broader picture.
	I am pleased that the Bill places an equal duty on public sector and private sector bodies in respect of equalities in the delivery of services. At this point, I must advise my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General that I shall introduce what I hope will be regarded as a helpful amendment because there seems to be a small oversight in clause 1, which specifies a list of public bodies. Unfortunately, it leaves out unitary councils while including the council of the Isles of Scilly. I think that rather more people are represented by unitary councils than by the council of the Isles of Scilly. Similarly, when it comes to the health service the Bill specifies primary care trusts, but I think it would be much wiser for it to cover all NHS trusts. It should be made clear that any arm of the NHS that deals with patients and the public in general must observe the equalities duty.

Roger Berry: I am so grateful for that most welcome intervention. The only organisation that any Member in the House has been able to put forward as an organisation opposing the Bill is the Campaign Against Political Correctness.  [Interruption.] Age Concern supports it, but forget Age Concern. Listen to the Campaign Against Political Correctness. I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman will inform his constituents, who may be active supporters of Age Concern, that he dismisses their support in that rather scornful way— [Interruption.]

Roger Berry: I am well aware that there are Members in all parts of the House, including the hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Boswell) and one or two others who I hope will speak soon, who support improvements in equality legislation. I must, however, comment on the one or two Members who, from a sedentary position, in response to the comment from the Leader of the House that it was the Labour Government who introduced the Race Relations Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Sex Discrimination Act and so on, objected to the idea that nothing at all had been introduced by the previous Conservative Government.
	It is correct to say that the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 was introduced by a Conservative Government. I remember it well. It is well documented. I will not detain the House, other than to say that the only reason why the DDA was introduced in 1995, with all the loopholes—it was like a string vest—was that various hon. Members, with support from all parties, had on several occasions tried to introduce the Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill. Following the way in which the then Conservative Government blocked that Bill, when I happened to be the promoter that year, and how three Members of the House had to apologise to the House for using tactics that were misleading, the Government were so embarrassed by the public opposition that they introduced the DDA.
	Like my colleagues, I genuinely thought we had got past that. We have had cross-party support for almost all the equalities legislation since. We had support for the Disability Rights Commission Act 1999, the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Act 2001, the Disability Discrimination Act 2005, and the Equality Act 2006. Those are only the disabilities measures that spring to mind. Therefore I was hoping that we would get cross-party support this evening, and I am sure we will, but the official Opposition will not be with us.
	Despite comments to the effect that there are lots of wonderful things in the Bill—the hon. Member for Epping Forest said that she supported most of it—we will be urged by the official Opposition to vote for an amendment that kills the Bill in its tracks. The only organisation that will be happy about that is the Campaign Against Political Correctness—not Age Concern, RADAR, the BMA or anybody who has taken a serious interest in these issues.

Bob Spink: May I assure the hon. Gentleman that he has the support of this party, even though this party is a one-man band as an Independent in this place? Nevertheless, I support the Bill, which has some wonderful things in it. Does he agree that we need to examine it carefully in Committee to strengthen it if we can? For instance, public bodies are told by the Bill that they may take into account the impediments of disabled people. There are many disabled people with serious impediments who think that public authorities should always take those impediments into account.

Graham Brady: I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry), who is a sincere man who has achieved much in this area. I pay tribute to him for that. However, at one or two points in his remarks, he fell into the great paradox of this issue in that some of the most fervent advocates of equality exhibit a degree of intolerance of the views of others. He and the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Dr. Turner) both appeared to be slightly bemused that others could take a different view of this Bill. I hope to help them with my remarks.
	I believe passionately in equality, especially in equality of opportunity. I do not like the way in which the issue is addressed in this Bill, but I believe perhaps more in social mobility—as one of the factors that has brought me to this House—than in anything else. But I profoundly reject the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) spoke about the difference between now and the time when the Bill was first conceived some four years ago. She said that equality matters, whatever the economic climate, and I agree. But competitiveness also matters. This would have been a bad Bill four years ago and it is a bad Bill now, for a variety of reasons.
	One reason—and by no means the most important—is the cost and bureaucracy that it will pile on to businesses at a time when so many of them are unable to bear the additional cost.
	The hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown said that the Bill was about consolidation and asked how anybody could object to it if they agreed with its constituent parts. Well, I agree with most if not all of the constituent parts, but the hon. Gentleman also said that some philosophical changes are at stake in the Bill. Some of those are quite worrying. Some of the concerns are about bizarre definitions, and some people may not understand why they are a necessary part of the Bill—I have struggled with them. Clause 11 states that
	"a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to a man or to a woman".
	I would have thought that that was axiomatic. However, it continues:
	"a reference to persons who share a protected characteristic is a reference to persons of the same sex."
	That is bizarre and it is difficult to follow the logic of it.
	The explanatory notes on clause 13 state that
	"it is not discrimination to treat a disabled person more favourably than a person who is not disabled".
	But it then claims that
	"racial segregation is always discriminatory".
	Earlier, the issue of a hierarchy of equalities was raised, with some types of equality seeming to rank as more important than others. That brings me to the point that I raised with the Leader of the House earlier of the example in the explanatory notes. They state:
	"If an employer advertising a vacancy makes it clear in the advert that Roma need not apply, this would amount to direct race discrimination against a Roma who might reasonably have considered applying".
	We might all think that that makes perfect sense—except that my reading of the Bill suggests that, if the Roma were already statistically over-represented in the place of employment, it would become legal for the employer to advertise saying, "Roma need not apply," because it would establish a right for the employer to seek to give preference to another under-represented group.
	As I put it to the Leader of the House, is it not the case that, under these proposals, an employer could choose to employ a white woman in preference to an equally well-qualified black man? She did not directly answer the question, because the answer is yes. So we are actually setting out a hierarchy of different, competing equalities. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow) was laughing earlier, when he saw me scribbling down the phrase, "Equality disappearing up its own backside." This is becoming so complicated that, in seeking to protect some groups quite properly from discrimination, there is a risk of inflicting discrimination on others.

Graham Brady: Absolutely. I am grateful to the Solicitor-General for that clarification. My concern is that, in the example that I gave earlier to the Leader of the House, if a business chose to avoid employing people from an ethnic minority, for example, and its work force were therefore 100 per cent. white, it might be that employer's preference to retain a 100 per cent. white work force. We are giving that employer the choice, as the Solicitor-General puts it—not the requirement or the obligation—to continue to discriminate against ethnic minorities, by choosing to tackle the under-representation of women in that work place.

Hywel Williams: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick), who made an interesting speech. Unfortunately, I may possibly repeat one or two of his points, although I shall make them slightly differently.
	The Bill is very much welcomed by Members on the Plaid Cymru Bench. Ensuring fairness, regardless of race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, religion or belief, is right and likely to be effective in the long term in developing our countries' economies. In respect of my particular concern, age discrimination, banning ageism in the provision of goods, facilities and services is a significant step forward. However, I have two reservations that I should like to outline briefly. They might be addressed in Committee.
	First, and unsurprisingly to some Members, I am concerned about the fact that discrimination on the basis of language is not included. Earlier, we heard complaints from a Conservative Member, the hon. Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), about a requirement to speak Polish. He was dismayed at a requirement to speak Polish for a certain job, but if speaking Polish is a legitimate occupational qualification, that is no problem whatever. I cannot see why he is so exercised about it.
	My concern is both broader, in a sense, because it concerns all of society, and more specific, because it is about my country, Wales. It is about the treatment of the Welsh language and the fact that the subject does not appear in the Bill. The Bill does not reflect the social, economic and legal reality in Wales, where both Welsh and English are used widely and are, to quote the Welsh Language Act 1993,
	"on a basis of equality".
	"Equality" is the important word here. That Act treats the Welsh and English languages on a basis of equality, yet the Equality Bill makes no reference to Welsh, and that might lead to problems.
	To go back to my earlier remarks about the Polish language, or any other language, for that matter, Welsh is different, in that it has a certain legal status—a status that clearly does not seem to have impressed itself sufficiently on the people who drew up the Bill, despite the attempted persuasion of the Welsh Language Board; I know that there was some correspondence. On the legal status of the language, as I said earlier, the 1993 Act says that English and Welsh are to be treated on a basis of equality, and there are various ways in which that should be achieved. Historically, there have been separate arrangements for Wales, in respect of the language, for a very long time, starting with the official ban on the use of Welsh in the early 16th century under the Acts of Union. That was nearly 500 years ago, so we in this place have a bit of experience of dealing with that language issue, whatever complexities might arise with regard to Polish, or any other of the 60, 70 or 80 languages that might be heard outside this place.
	There have been further legislative moves. The Welsh Courts Act 1942 and the Welsh Language Acts of 1967 and 1993 were passed by a national Government, a Labour Government and a Conservative Government respectively, so the issue is not party political. Of course, the Conservative 1993 Act set up the Welsh Language Board. On the language issue and the law, the Welsh Affairs Committee is currently considering a legislative competence order that would transfer the right to pass laws on the Welsh language to the National Assembly for Wales. Eventually, laws will be passed in the Welsh Assembly on the Welsh language, but the Bill is silent on any relationship or possible clash between such laws passed in the Assembly and any other laws passed in this place. The legislative competence order would transfer most, but not all, language legislation to the Welsh Assembly Government.
	One intention of the Welsh Assembly Government is to create a language commissioner. Such a commissioner might pass judgment on employment issues. Conservative Members have voiced concerns about a clash, or a hierarchy of discrimination; the concern is that some sorts of discrimination might be viewed more seriously than others. We might have a clash between the Welsh Assembly Government's intentions for the Welsh language and any provision passed in the Bill.
	Unfortunately, there is a long history of discrimination on the basis of language in Wales in modern times, from the infamous Brewer Spinks case of the early 1960s, in which an entire work force were banned from speaking Welsh in a factory, until the owner changed his mind, to the recent case of Thomas Cook, which tried to ban its workers from speaking Welsh in the workplace. Again, it later overturned its decision. The Welsh Assembly Government intends to establish a right to speak Welsh; they have told us that. That measure relating to the Welsh language might—I do not know—in some way clash with the intentions of the Bill. That is why I am slightly concerned about the fact that the Bill is silent on the issue.
	Another question that came to mind when I considered the issue was how the post of language commissioner would work. Hon. Members might not know that we already have two other sorts of commissioners in Wales. We have a Commissioner for Older People in Wales, and a Children's Commissioner for Wales, who have powers. Of course, there is a Children's Commissioner for England, too. The interrelationship worries me, and I would be interested to hear the Solicitor-General's response on that subject in her winding-up speech.
	The second issue to do with the Bill that causes me concern is that of age discrimination, which the hon. Member for Walsall, North mentioned. I have a long-standing interest in the matter; in fact, the first amendment that I ever moved in Committee was on the Employment Bill in 2002. It was aimed at extending protection from unfair dismissal to people who are over retirement age. I was helped then, as I am now, by Age Concern. The amendment was unsuccessful, and we waited until 2006, when the Government acted—albeit only partially. My concern, which Members from all parts of the House share, is that the Bill fails to remove compulsory retirement—the so-called mandatory or default retirement age.
	However, as Members might expect, I commend the proposed steps to outlaw age discrimination. Age discrimination is the most common discrimination of all and, alas, one that we are all in danger of facing, some sooner rather than later. Any steps that are taken to combat age discrimination are therefore very welcome. There has been a long-standing call to make age discrimination illegal, and it is a live and important issue for many of our constituents, particularly those in my part of the world, north Wales, where we have a higher than average proportion of older people. It is a particularly salient issue there, but it is an issue throughout the UK.
	I understand that the Government will look separately at the mandatory retirement age, as the Minister for Women and Equality said earlier, but that we will apparently have to wait until 2012. In the context of the current political situation, however, who knows who will be in power in 2012, or whether they will be inclined to implement any change?
	I am also concerned that the omission of action on the mandatory retirement age may contribute both to some people's false impression that such age discrimination is acceptable in this particular circumstance—albeit in the short term—and to a climate of opinion. Most Members will know someone who has been the victim of age discrimination, as will most of our constituents, because, in the real world of work, older employees, who may be valued by enlightened employers for their commitment, skills and experience, may be undervalued by other employers who see their age as a proxy for many undesirable qualities, from an inability to turn up in the morning to the likelihood of being ill, in poor health or inflexible. All those negative connotations might lead a bad employer, at a time of redundancies, to select older people for redundancy. That proxy is unfortunate and misplaced, but the assumptions, which are not based on the individual's health or qualities, may be very influential in their future employment.
	The age discrimination that many workers face often leads them to feel that their right to work is less certain, but it is not limited to people who are 64-and-a-half, as was mentioned earlier in the debate; it affects people in their 50s and, even, late 40s. They look to the future with some trepidation, concerned that a climate of opinion has not been fostered, because the Bill fails to address the mandatory retirement age.
	Many people find retirement to be a time of freedom and opportunity, and their right to choose to retire should be protected. Others, however, want to work into later life, and it is an entirely laudable desire. They may want to maintain their network of colleagues and friends, and they may want and need to maintain their incomes by earning money for work that they have done. As has been said, it is ironic that this House, which legislates on matters such as mandatory retirement age, benefits from the contribution of Members who have long passed their retirement age but still have a great contribution to make. It is even more ironic in respect of the other place. I have often been impressed by the clarity, incisiveness and, indeed, sheer trouble-making genius of people in the other place—people who might, in other situations, be regarded as beyond working age or on the scrap heap.
	Those are my concerns about the mandatory retirement age, and I hope to see them addressed in Committee. There is a great deal to welcome in the Bill. I have reservations, but Plaid Cymru Members will not support the Conservative amendment tonight.

Judy Mallaber: I welcome the Bill and am pleased to speak in the debate. It is very important to bring together in a single Act those measures that have accumulated over many years, and I am delighted that we are extending protection to a number of groups, such as disabled people, carers and older people. On the consolidation of those measures, however, I contest totally what the Tory Opposition say. The Bill will make it easier, not more difficult, for individuals and businesses to understand and to use the legislation.
	I was very sorry to miss the opening speeches, because an accident closed the motorway and I got caught by the Tamils, delaying me by three hours. I was particularly disappointed, because I wanted to intervene on the right hon. Member for Maidstone—[Hon. Members: "Maidenhead."] I got the wrong one. I will return later to the questions that I wanted to ask the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May), because I am astonished that the Conservative Opposition are opposed to giving the Bill a Second Reading. I understand the considered arguments of the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady), who obviously had considered views about why he opposed the Bill, although I in turn oppose them. He said that he supported very strongly equality of opportunity, but because of the discrimination that there has been over many years against a number of groups, it is discriminatory not to redress the balance if one is going to not have discrimination now—if that tortuous wording makes any sense to people.
	The hon. Gentleman had a considered view against the legislation, but I was surprised by the desire of a number of Conservative Members to jump up and say, "But we welcome large parts of this Bill." They then really struggled to explain why they want, in the words of the reasoned amendment, to decline
	"to give a Second Reading to the Equality Bill".
	They almost spoke as if they did not support the amendment.
	The hon. Member for Epping Forest (Mrs. Laing) blamed the Solicitor-General for not allowing Opposition Members to hold the Government to account, but the hon. Lady wanted not to dissect the Bill but to chuck it out, which would be a grave mistake and a missed opportunity. I appreciate many points in the Conservative amendment, but I do not agree with most of them. They are all worthy of debate, but I cannot see that they are sufficient to chuck out the whole works. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) gave a long list of the organisations that support the Bill, and I really hope that the Opposition will change their mind, keep the cross-party view about support for advancing equality and enter into a detailed debate about their concerns.
	The promotion of equality has been central to my work since I became involved in politics—indeed, in thinking about anything. Part of the motivating force for my becoming involved was to try to promote equality in all its facets, but the first time that I became involved in this place in its promotion was when we were trying to incorporate the provisions of the Good Friday agreement into what became the Northern Ireland Act 1998. Astonishingly, that legislation and agreement was way ahead of any that we had for England, Wales and Scotland. Interestingly, too, many groups in Northern Ireland, which were at the extremes of the political divide at the time, understood the power of tackling equality to undermine some of the worst things that were happening in society. It was a powerful tool for dealing with the disadvantaged and the causes of their suffering in that country, in respect of religion and other areas of equality. They strongly supported trying through the Good Friday agreement and then the 1998 Act to promote a view of equality that was way in advance of what we had on this side of the water.
	I shall not repeat too much of what everyone else has said, because I support many areas of the Bill. I shall, however, read out the first sentence of our briefing from Age Concern and Help the Aged:
	"The Equality Bill represents a milestone in achieving equality for older people and should be welcomed by politicians of all parties."
	I say this to Opposition Members: please do not throw it out. Let us welcome it and then deal with the items of concern.
	It is worth citing a couple of examples of age discrimination from Age Concern and Help the Aged. As I, and all of us, get older, the issue hits home more clearly. The mother of a woman who called Age Concern was buying something for £150 at a leading department store. At the till, she was asked whether she wanted to apply for a charge card so that she could get a 10 per cent. discount. As soon as she said that she was 65, however, the cashier apologised and said that she could not have the card because she was too old. Why? Her money was good enough. I cannot get my head around why she should not have been entitled to the card just because she was older. If she had been about to get ill and drop dead, she would not have been able to buy the next item and get the 10 per cent. off. What was the problem? An older man, a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists who flies aeroplanes every week, tried to hire a car at Edinburgh airport. He was 70, so he had to agree to pay the first £500 of any claim, including for theft. Did the insurer think that he would not be able to run quickly enough to stop a thief getting in the car? That is another bizarre example, and I am pleased that the Bill will tackle such issues.
	Age Concern and Help the Aged said that the opportunity to abolish forced retirement had been missed. My hon. Friend the Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) and the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) commented on that. My hon. Friend the Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Dr. Turner) made an interesting contribution on how we might address the issue. I hope that those points will be looked at further.
	Some employers really welcome older employees. The management at the B&Q in my area go out of their way to get older employees. The last thing that they want is a young whippersnapper who has never done any work on houses pretending that he knows how to advise customers on how to do things in the home; they want the person who has been doing the work for the past 40 years and knows what people want and need and knows what did not work when they were doing work on their house. That B&Q goes out of its way to employ older people, so it is not all doom and gloom when it comes to ageism. The Bill provides a welcome move in the right direction.
	On addressing the gap in relation to socio-economic inequalities, I should say that the Conservative amendment misses the point. One of the party's reasons for not wanting the Bill to have a Second Reading is that the Bill
	"fails to address the root causes of the reduction in social mobility in recent years".
	The whole point of placing a new duty on Ministers, Departments and public bodies to consider what action they can take to reduce inequalities on socio-economic grounds is that there will be a mechanism to consider issues such as why we are not dealing with social mobility and why there are still socio-economic inequalities. That will be able to be done systematically across Departments. The Bill gives the precise mechanism that would address one of the criticisms in the Conservative motion.
	I hope that the Conservative party will consider the issue again; it is valuable that at last we are saying that we need to address inequality in relation to class and socio-economic advantage. According to how I read it, the Bill is careful to say that that will not mean that a front-line decision by a service provider will suddenly be dealt with in that way; we will not suddenly find a doctor saying, "I'm not treating you because you come from too advantaged an area and you're too rich." However, it will require my primary care trust and local authority to consider health disparities and inequalities and how we can deal with them.
	The Bill makes positive inroads into one area of health inequality: it promotes women's ability to breastfeed in public. I was astonished by the bizarre intervention made by the hon. Member for Epping Forest; I am sorry that she is not still here. One would hardly know that most women whom I see breastfeeding in public are doing it; they are so discreet that they would not offend anybody. I do not know why it would, however. If it does, the problem belongs to the person being offended and not to the woman and child who are doing something that makes a vital contribution to reducing health inequalities. The World Health Organisation says that mothers should breastfeed.
	It would not normally have occurred to me to pick up on this issue in this debate, but I have had e-mails from constituents who are concerned to promote this aspect of the Bill. One thing that came across is that lower socio-economic groups and younger mothers are less likely to breastfeed, certainly in public places—partly because they find doing so embarrassing and unacceptable. That puts them off doing it at all. If when they are out and about they find it difficult to breastfeed, they will lack confidence and worry about the reaction of other people.
	I am delighted at the BEARS groups in my local area, at which mothers provide breastfeeding support to other women. There is one in the Langley Mill Sure Start centre, recently visited by my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister for Women and Equality, and in other Sure Start centres. In the run-up to the elections, I am worried in case Derbyshire county council stops being Labour and our wonderful Sure Start centres are closed. They provide fantastic help, including on this issue, to less advantaged families to make sure that the kids have a good start in life. That would be threatened if we ended up with a Tory county council and a Tory Government; I just throw in that comment in passing. The breastfeeding element of the Bill is valuable.
	It is good that we are to make it clear that public bodies can use public procurement in the drive to equality. When I served on the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Committee and we were writing the report on public procurement and the one entitled "Jobs for the Girls", which was about trying to address the gender pay gap and inequalities, we heard public organisations say that public procurement could not be used in this context. We argued, however, that if public authorities have a duty to promote gender equality, they will fail if they do not ensure that those to whom they give contracts take suitable steps to try to address inequality in their employment and service practices. We saw a number of positive examples of how the £175 billion of public procurement can be used to promote equality, and I am pleased at that.
	Equal pay is the issue on which there has been most opposition, with people saying that some provisions would be a burden on business; at least that is how I interpreted what was being said when we were told that the issue was difficult. There is the issue of gender pay reports. Transparency is absolutely vital; there is still a massive pay gap. I find it hard to understand how hon. Members can say that the gap is a scandal but also that they do not want to do anything about it. I wanted to raise questions with the right hon. Member for Maidstone—[Hon. Members: "Maidenhead!"] Why do I always get it wrong? I wanted to raise with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead arguments related to some parliamentary questions that I tabled today. In the amendment, and in a private Member's Bill put forward by the right hon. Lady, is a proposal for the implementation of
	"compulsory pay audits for those organisations...found guilty of discrimination by an employment tribunal".
	I assume that the right hon. Lady has done her research, but the problem is that her proposal would have hardly any effect. I do not know whether she has worked out how many employers have been found guilty in tribunals. Unison, my union, has 40,000 outstanding equal pay cases before tribunals. The tribunals are clogged up. In 2007-08, 62,000 equal pay claims were brought, but the tribunals dealt with only 9,000 of them and only 678 were successful at tribunal. Many of those cases would have been multiple ones relating to the same employer. Do the Conservative Opposition even know how many employers would be caught by the provision?

John Bercow: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Judy Mallaber), to whose candid contribution I listened, as always, with interest and respect.
	I begin by declaring an interest as a member of the Speaker's conference that is committed to securing greater representation in this House from women, members of the ethnic minorities, people with disabilities and, as far as I am concerned, people from the LGBT—lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender—community, which has historically been hugely unrepresented in this House.
	I should also say at the outset, for the avoidance of doubt, that I strongly support the Bill. It is a good, progressive, visionary and overdue Bill, and, I would argue, a Bill that manifestly and incontrovertibly deserves a Second Reading. In the course of my contribution, I shall seek to explain to the House the rationale for my view.
	As other right hon. and hon. Members have acknowledged, there are two elements to the Bill—the consolidatory feature, on the one hand, and the feature of extension, on the other. It is pretty much unarguable that we need to consolidate the law. A sprawling and complex mosaic of enactments has grown like Topsy over a period of 40 years, and it is high time that that was consolidated and distilled into one readily intelligible and accessible piece of legislation. It is a considerable tribute to the parliamentary draftspeople, intellectually and administratively, that they have accomplished that task.
	We should not then say, "Well, it ends there", because consolidation is necessary but, frankly, not sufficient. Those who admire only the consolidatory features of the Bill are, in a sense, resting content with exiguous achievements. We need to go rather further than that. Let us look at the context and background to the unveiling of new and further measures. As the Minister for Women and Equality pointed out, it is 40 years next year since the passage of the Equal Pay Act 1970 and, despite all that has been achieved, the pay gap, though on a lesser scale, nevertheless stubbornly persists. People with disabilities are twice as likely to be out of work. Members of the ethnic minorities are 13 per cent. less likely to get a job. In schools, despite all the changes in legislation and, to a degree, in culture, children who are, or who are wrongly thought to be, lesbian, gay or bisexual are harassed and bullied on a monumental scale. Therefore, we cannot be self-satisfied. I am always suspicious of people who say, "I'm all in favour of equality, but it isn't really necessary to do anything about it", or, "We're all in favour of equality"—end of argument, no requirement for legislation, and by the way, would it not be socially desirable to talk about some other subject altogether?
	The fact is that much remains to be done. I want, if I may, to focus on a number of features of the Bill that seem to lie at its heart. I mentioned some of the disadvantage that persists, but in a sense the biggest single problem with which we are confronted in all parties in this House is that social mobility, which is palpably a good after which we should all strive, has stalled at best and regressed at worse. That has happened under successive Governments, with attempts to do good here and there. It is a long-standing phenomenon, and we have to seek to arrest and reverse that trend. Hence the introduction of clause 1, with its imposition of the socio-economic duty. If one believed some of the more hysterical headlines and articles beneath them in the newspapers, one would think that this heralded the emergence of the vanguard of the revolution, and that truly one had to be a Marxist-Leninist, a Trotskyist or a workerist to believe in the imposition of such a clause. In fact, it simply entails an acknowledgment and a recognition that leaving things entirely to the market and the free play of those forces is not enough—one must have some action from Government and Parliament of a protective and enabling character.
	Let me consider what attempts to reduce inequalities of outcome by the imposition of the socio-economic duty on public sector bodies might mean in practical terms. It might mean that in a particular area of notable disadvantage a health trust decides to focus its anti-smoking policy, or its smoking cessation service, on a disadvantaged community, in which there might be evidence to show that the incidence of nicotine addiction was much greater than elsewhere. That is an extremely good thing in the name of reducing health inequalities and encouraging and making more likely decent longevity in that community.
	What else might the socio-economic duty mean? It might mean that in a particular area where there is a concentration of disadvantage and where children face great difficulty in getting into some of the better-performing schools, the parents are given advice on the school's application process by professionals, experts and well-wishers to better the chances of those otherwise disadvantaged children. It might even mean—I would favour this; it was practised in Brighton under the Conservatives and by one school, very briefly, in Hammersmith and Fulham—the adoption of a lottery system. I know that that is politically unpopular, but I continue to believe that it is thoroughly right and fair.

John Bercow: They would, and I hope that that will not arise and that there will be an opportunity in the course of the Bill's passage to make certain that it does not.
	Positive action has been the subject of some debate, which I think has become excessively convoluted. Some of my hon. Friends have fears about it that are wholly unrealistic. My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale, West (Mr. Brady) is an admirable parliamentarian, but his sense that there will be a competitive hierarchy of disadvantage, or alternatively of cases of positive action, will probably not be realised in practice. My view is that if a primary school has real difficulty in getting male teachers, and there are two candidates of equal merit, it should be permitted—not prescribed—for the school to opt for the man. Similarly, if there is a bank with an all-male, besuited board and not a woman in sight, and there is a strong woman candidate on the shortlist, it should be open to the bank to say, "We will have the woman in the name of the diversity of the work force that will thereby result".
	What is more, it is a question not just of decency to the individual but of benefit to the business and potentially the wider economy. Research by the Catalyst organisation shows that when Fortune 500 companies recruit and promote on that basis, they do better on sales by about 42 per cent., on return on capital invested by about 66 per cent. and on equity return by about 53 per cent. The provision will ordinarily be used as a tie-breaker. I do not need to labour the point, but it seems to me that it is an example of an active assertion of the need for change. Just leaving things as they are will not lead to progress.

John Bercow: Yes. I gave the example of women, but the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to challenge me more widely. I certainly do think so, and in principle I am sympathetic to the idea of black and minority ethnic shortlists. However, the world does not change in a day. I have been doing my best since January 2003, unsuccessfully thus far, to persuade my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench to accept the principle and practice of all-women shortlists. I am happy to take that on board as part of my list of demands with which I go to my colleagues to lobby, with some expectation of eventual but not immediate success.
	The gender pay gap is a huge issue, and I can see why my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs. May) believes that her idea of compulsory pay audits for demonstrably errant companies is valid. The Government should seriously consider that, as it is a practical and sensible idea. However, I do not agree with the thesis that we should simply pursue a selective policy and eschew the idea of a universal requirement. All that is involved in the clauses on this subject is, first, the ban on secrecy clauses—that is very sensible, because information is power, and if people do not know what others are getting they are in less of a position to argue, lobby and seek better treatment for themselves—and secondly, the requirement from 2013, in the event of inadequate progress in the interim, that companies with 250 or more employees should publish an annual statement of the gender pay gap in their organisation.
	That requirement is extraordinarily modest and a long way in the coming. The Government certainly cannot be accused of being excessively hasty or unreasonable about it, as they are looking to see what progress will be made. Of course, it will apply only to approximately 0.5 per cent. of all businesses, so the idea that the decimation of the industrial or commercial base of the country and mass unemployment will result from this relatively modest and well-overdue provision seems somewhat far-fetched. If we look at the evidence, we find that when companies behave well, on the whole they do better with a more diverse work force.

Sharon Hodgson: It may have been the making of my career, but I leave that to hon. Members to wonder at.
	At the time, I was a young personnel clerk and I had applied to be a training officer. I got down to the last two, but I did not get the job. During feedback, I was told that the reason—it was not the main reason; it was the only reason—I did not get the job was that my accent was thought to be too strong for the branch staff in the south, who would not be able to understand me. Well, I am pleased to say that my accent has not stopped me being selected for my party or, I am glad to say, being elected to this place by the people of my constituency, thank you very much. I hope that everyone here this evening can understand what I am saying.
	That happened more than 20 years ago and I would like to think that things are a little different now. I would also go so far as to say that that may be due in no small part to Ant and Dec. People seem to like the north-east accent now. The legislation will mean that neither I nor anyone else will ever again be discriminated against solely because of our accents. However, I knew then, and I still know, that it was not my accent that cost me that promotion; it was what the accent stood for—that is, my class and my background. The Bill will ensure, as much as we can, that employers and even educators will never be able to cite someone's accent as a reason for turning them down for a job or anything else.
	In many ways, I am one of the lucky ones. I never wanted to be an MP when I was younger, because—well, I would never have dreamed it was possible, coming from my background and with my life circumstances, and especially not because I am a woman. Working-class men from the north-east had made it here for generations, but not many working-class women had, if any. I am not totally sure, but I think I may have been the first working-class woman born and bred in the north-east to make it here to represent a north-east constituency, or any other type of constituency for that matter.
	I have come a long way from doing the accounts and payroll at Tyneside Safety Glass. I left school at 16 to get a job, in order to help my mam financially with my two younger brothers, as she was on her own. That was at a time when the north-east was being ravaged by the consequences of the Conservative party's assault on industry, our communities and the way of life in the north-east. My breaks in life came through hard work, aspiration, determination and workplace education, which this Government have widened and enshrined in statute, through union learning reps and Return to Learn programmes, which have given hundreds of thousands of people, especially those from my generation—the Thatcher generation—a second chance in life.
	Through membership of the Labour party, I found a passion for politics and a way to make a difference by trying to redress the balance and make life fairer for people like me across the country. Just as we cannot help the family circumstances we are born into, we cannot help where in the country we are born. However, when I was growing up, being born in the north-east made such a difference to my life opportunities and those of everyone around me. Some might say that it still does, but I believe that, thankfully, it does to a much lesser extent. The injustice of the north-south divide was—and still is—a huge driving force in my politics.
	In the Labour party, I was part of an organisation that promoted fair rules and fair chances. My eventual selection came from an all-woman shortlist. I am currently the only woman MP in Tyne and Wear—there is me and 12 men—although hopefully that will change quite a bit at the next election, as my party has continued with that policy and selected more women to contest safe seats. That is the difference: women have to contest winnable seats, not just be allowed to stand in the marginals. However, none of that would have been possible had it not been for the determination of a few to create chances for the many. Those people were Labour people. I believe that this Bill, more than many others that I have seen in this House, reflects those deeply held values of fairness and equality.
	I want to take just a minute to reflect on why we need to keep pressing the case for improved gender equality in both Parliament and the workplace. Just under 20 per cent. of our MPs are women. When we look to other countries, such as Sweden and Rwanda, where women account for nearly half of all members of Parliament, we are surely urged to action. I am one of only 291 women MPs ever. There are currently more than 520 men or thereabouts in this Parliament. I do not know the total for all Parliaments ever, but a rough calculation suggests that it must be many thousands, if not tens of thousands. Two-hundred and ninety-one women and 120 still here makes 170 women MPs or thereabouts—I might be a few out—who have gone before us. Indeed, there are a few women MPs—just a few though—here now.
	Being part of a chosen few makes me feel very special, but I am also very sad that so few women have had the chance to sit on these Green Benches and make a difference and improve the country's legislation. That is why the Bill is doing just that. It is thanks to women on our Front Bench, and my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister for Women and Equality in particular, that we are in this position.

Evan Harris: I would certainly agree that the Labour party had a very good record on equality up to the 1997 general election. Indeed, I think that it was the hon. Member for Buckingham (John Bercow), who has contributed enormously well to the debate on a number of occasions, who pointed out that it was a social democratic approach—I would say that it is also liberal. It is no surprise, therefore, that Roy Jenkins was so heavily involved in the Labour party in the moves to provide equality in certain areas at a time when it was less popular to do so and less acceptable than it is now.
	The Government will get this Bill through—I hope that they do—and it is hardly being opposed in this House. That is a sign that the Government are pushing against an extremely open door in a way that the Labour party could not when it introduced earlier legislative proposals to provide for equality. The Government are implementing, quite rightly, their manifesto commitment to abolish unjustified discrimination wherever it exists. My regret is that that was a 1997 election manifesto commitment. Over the 12 years for which I have been a Member of this House, I have questioned why it has taken so long for the Government and the House to do some of the things that could have been done many years previously.
	My party's record is pretty good. We opposed section 28 when it was introduced, for example, and pressed for an early end to discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. We first tabled amendments to the criminal law in 1998 to bring in laws on sexual offences that treated people equally, regardless of sexual orientation. That legislation was enacted in 2003. The Government were forced by European judgments to bring in equality on the ground of sexual orientation in the armed forces, but they should have done so before. We also urged them to introduce civil partnerships legislation, which they have now done, and supported them to the hilt when they introduced the controversial—for some—regulations on the provision of goods and services without discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation.
	On age discrimination, I remember urging my colleagues through the Lobby to vote on an amendment to the Employment Relations Bill in the late 1990s, to end age discrimination in employment. We have also argued that that could and should have been brought in as part of the Equality Act 2006. Nevertheless, we are where we are now, and I welcome the fact that the Government are introducing these provisions.
	I want to discuss three topics: the balance to be struck between free speech and harassment; the exemptions on discrimination, particularly on the grounds of religion and sexual orientation, where another tension obviously exists; and the proposed public sector duty, every aspect of which is to include a duty to promote equal opportunities in respect of religion.
	I ought to declare a couple of interests. I am a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which has performed significant scrutiny of previous equality legislation and proposes to do much more on this Bill. We have already had a very useful and mutually beneficial meeting with officials from the equalities team. I also hold honorary positions with the British Humanist Association, the Liberal Democrat lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender campaign, and the National Secular Society.
	Before I start on my three topics, I want to point out that inequality is a vital issue in this country. It is terrible that the gap between the rich and the poor has got wider. The rich, even in this recession, are far richer than they were 12 years ago, and, even before the recession, the poor were relatively poorer than they were before. Radical action is needed, and my hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone) has already said that she does not think that the provisions in the Bill represent that radical action. It is policies that will bring about the end of inequality, including policies on taxation. I am still astounded about what has happened on tax policy over the last three Parliaments. The fair taxes have not been increased, but the regressive ones have. For the Conservative party to say that it wants to do something about the inequality in wealth between the rich and the poor while its flagship policy is to cut the tax payable by the richest estates in the country is simply astonishing.
	The hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) intervened on the hon. Member for Kingswood (Roger Berry) to make a point about political correctness, and I should like to say to him that the Campaign Against Political Correctness might be against the Bill, but political correctness can work both ways. If it is politically correct to say that it is not acceptable—I mean socially acceptable; I am not arguing about criminality here—to call people "cripples" or "spastics", then I support political correctness. If supporting political correctness means that it becomes unacceptable—even in private, where it would not be against the law—to call people "sooty" or "Paki", then I support political correctness. The hon. Gentleman needs to define what he means by political correctness. If he defines it very narrowly, I might agree with him, but it is not enough just to talk about it as the tabloids do.
	My first topic is the balance between free speech and laws that protect people. What kind of protection are we talking about in anti-harassment provisions? We are talking about the freedom from being offended, or worse. I certainly accept that this is not just about being offended. This can occur in public, in employment and in the provision of goods and services, including a special case involving public services and the delivery of public functions.
	In public, the Government have rightly accepted that there is a difference between homophobic or religious hatred and, for example, racial hatred, because the offence involved is very narrow. They have recognised that free speech can be impeded. I am sure that I would not agree with most of that speech, but I recognise that some religious organisations, for example, need to be able to explain their views on sexual orientation or the religious beliefs of others. Similarly, I have argued for amendment of section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986, which criminalises the use of insult as being likely to cause distress, goes too far and could lead to bizarre prosecutions or investigations by the police. I hope the Government will recognise the point. They have made an exception in cases of religion and homophobia, and they are right to do so.
	In employment, there is protection against harassment, and employment probably provides the strongest case for it because one has to be secure at work, but our harassment provisions are pretty wide. Indeed, the human rights memorandum on the Joint Committee on Human Rights website, probably also to be found on the Government Equalities Office website, accepts the point, stating that harassment laws
	"have been controversial in respect of certain protected characteristics (namely, religion or belief, sexual orientation and gender reassignment) and opponents have been concerned that applying the broader domestic definition of harassment to these characteristics could infringe Article 9 and Article 10 Convention rights."
	I hope that question will be dealt with in Committee. It is not simply a matter of defining harassment as engaging in
	"unwanted conduct related to a relevant protected characteristic which has the purpose or effect of... creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment",
	because also relevant is
	"the purpose or effect of violating a person's dignity".
	Because it is non-intentional and because the views of the victim are important, this can be cast very widely.
	I worry when I hear about cases such as the Christian night-shift worker who was having a conversation with a fellow worker about his views on homosexuality; apparently, although we only have his side of the story, he said in moderate terms that he thought it was wrong. Even if there were no prosecution under harassment law, as it were, I think it would be wrong if employers decided to take a strong view simply because someone felt that their dignity was violated because they were gay or knew someone who was gay and could not accept anyone sincerely disagreeing with them and using non-abusive language. I believe that that is going too far; we should not have to read that sort of press story or hear about that sort of activity. Here, I stand four-square with religious people who feel that they are not allowed to say those sorts of things. I do not recommend it, of course, but if they avoid abusive language, that is acceptable.
	With goods and services, the Government are right not to include harassment provisions relating to sexual orientation or religion. It was right that the Northern Ireland provisions were essentially struck down and have not been reintroduced in the Bill. It is impossible to restrict people's ability to explain their point of view when not providing goods and services. When it comes to the provision of public services and public functions, the question remains whether there might be scope for introducing some protection from harassment; gross harassment, of course, is discrimination.
	I was pleased to support the Equality Act 2006, which finally and rightly protected religious people—people with religion or belief—from discrimination. Indeed, as hon. Members may know, my private Member's Bill goes further to protect Catholics, in particular, from unjustified discrimination in our constitution. My Bill received support from all political parties, but it was talked out by the Lord Chancellor, no less, on Second Reading. I think that religious organisations, however, show too great a willingness to want to discriminate against other people. They accept the protections that they have been given, but want the scope to discriminate against other people—for example, on grounds of sexual orientation or religion.
	Schedule 9 deals with exemptions for religions in respect of employment. I recognise that the drafting here is better than it was in the Employment Equality (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2003. The import of the Amicus case has been included, where the provision states that a post with a sexual orientation test has to be one clearly involved in proselytising and not another. The subsequent provisions on page 182 of the Bill are, sadly, weaker, allowing organisations with a religious ethos not to have to justify the discrimination that they may wish to indulge in on grounds of religion, for example. Nevertheless, even that is better than the coach and horses run through the spirit of the Bill by the Schools Standards and Frameworks Act 1998, particularly sections 68, 69 and 70. As I was told by a maths teacher working in a state school funded 100 per cent. by the taxpayer, those provisions allow schools to tell teachers—regardless of whether they are teaching religious education—that they must have "Jesus in your heart". Is that really necessary for someone teaching maths in a primary school? What is going on? I find it regrettable that the Government have not taken the opportunity to recognise that organisations with a certain ethos can, if necessary, be governed by provisions that already operate in relation to a religious test, as opposed to a broad exception involving many other posts.
	As for the provision of goods and services, the problem still exists that schools are allowed to discriminate and segregate on the basis of religion. In an area containing, say, four schools, where one has a religious intake and can segregate and discriminate, children or families adhering to the religion concerned can choose any of those four schools, while everyone else has a choice of only three. If that is coupled with the public duty to provide equality of opportunity, a huge amount of pressure will be exerted for everyone to have their own school that discriminates, and I do not think that that is a good idea.
	The provision of public services involves a key question. Should there be a right to discriminate on grounds of religion, or indeed sexual orientation? I hope that, in Committee, the Government will recognise that the Employment Appeal Tribunal was correct in saying, in the case of the Islington registrar Lillian Ladele, that it was wrong for someone providing a public service to be allowed to discriminate, and that the council was right to say that everyone doing that job must not treat people differently according to their sexual orientation.
	We have read of a dentist who wants to require his women patients to wear a hijab before being able to access health care either on the NHS or privately. That cannot be right. Reasonable adjustment may be possible. For example, a cook may not want to cook pork. That does not involve discriminating against human beings, at least in respect of what they are doing, and it does not necessarily involve a public function.
	Finally, let me say something about the positive duty in regard to religion. Religion is different from the other strands. For example, it is not essential or immutable in the same way as race or gender. Religious beliefs give rise to policies and practices that are highly contested, unlike the other strands. Representatives of religions —rightly, in many cases—feel the need to proselytise in order to secure new followers, unlike representatives of other strands. Some religions campaign actively against equal treatment in relation to other strands, as they have a right to do. They are unique in that respect.
	For that reason, I think that, while we should ensure that there is a public duty to end discrimination on religious grounds and promote social cohesion, tackling inequality relating to religion may actually increase religious sensitivities. People may feel that they are not being given what someone else is being given because of historic service provision in that area, and may want the same for themselves. An example is the demand for it to be considered that sharia law might be given more status in relation to other religious laws.
	Those are the issues that I hope to raise in Committee.

Philip Davies: Indeed. What on earth would be wrong with that? It seems to me that the people who are truly racist and sexism see everything in terms of race and gender, rather than those of us who just wish people to be recruited entirely on merit. Batook Pandya, the director of Bristol-based charity Support Against Racist Incidents, put it perfectly when he said on the subject of fire service open days aimed at only ethnic minority recruits:
	"None of these open days should have been closed to white communities. I couldn't give two hoots if they are white, black, Asian, male or female—they should simply be the best person for the job."
	The Bill introduces the concept of protected characteristics: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion and belief, sex and sexual orientation. "Why stop there?" someone might ask. There are other people and possible items for such categories. Lots of people say that they are discriminated against in the workplace because of their weight, hair colour or the fact that they are bald—that has not always been a problem in my party. If people are discriminated against for all those factors, why are they not included in the Bill? Why not just go for a simplistic kind of equality?
	Perhaps the Solicitor-General in summing up will explain how much of the population is not covered by the protected groups. If in broad, estimated terms, 50 per cent. of the population are women, 10 per cent. are not white, 10 per cent. are homosexual, 20 per cent. are over 65, and 17 per cent. are disabled—I admit that a few of them will have more than one characteristic—there will not be many people who are not covered by the Bill. In fact, we will have a new minority: white, heterosexual men with no disability at all. That will be the only minority left that is not covered by the Bill.
	The Bill allows positive action in recruitment where any two candidates are as qualified as each other. That is complete nonsense. First, no two candidates are ever exactly the same, and the Bill therefore tries to introduce a scenario that we would only usually expect to hear in a primary school playground. Indeed, my six-year-old son is the only person who ever raises impossible hypotheticals with me, but I can now tell him that the Leader of the House has joined him in that quest. However, for the purposes of the argument, I will humour the Government and accept that that impossible scenario could happen.
	The Leader of the House claimed that positive action provision could only be invoked if two candidates were both equally the best. If the person—perhaps a woman, someone from an ethnic minority, or a male going for a job at a primary school, as in the case raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (John Bercow)—is genuinely the equal-best candidate, given that the employer has got to pick one or the other, perhaps the Government can explain which law currently in place prevents them from picking the one who is from the minority group. If they are genuinely joint-best candidates, one or other of them will be picked. This is a pointless solution.

Philip Davies: Other hon. Members want to speak. I wish that this was a Friday and that I could take as many interventions as possible and talk the Bill out, but I am afraid that time is limited.
	At worst, the Bill's real purpose is to introduce positive discrimination by the back door. Its most likely outcome is that it will have a chilling effect on employers, who will feel pressured into taking someone from an under-represented group who is not the best or the equal-best candidate for the job. It is also likely that we will see an increase in employment tribunals for employers to defend, thus wasting their time and money.
	Hon. Members need not just take my word for that; the Government claim in the explanatory notes that the Bill will cost the private sector a one-off sum of £211 million—just what it needs in a recession—and recurring costs of between £11 million and £17 million a year, consisting mainly of additional court and tribunal cases and compensation awards. That is actually in the Bill. The British Chambers of Commerce say it sends a poor message about UK businesses and that it will discourage job creation, which is all we need as unemployment surges towards 3 million. Companies will be loth to take on more employees so it will take longer to get out of the recession.

Philip Davies: I have already dealt with the right hon. Gentleman, who has not been in the Chamber for the whole debate.
	Why will the Labour party not allow people to be selected simply on merit? As Labour seems to need all-women shortlists, it must mean either that the party picks women who are not the best candidates or that the local Labour party is full of people who are so sexist that they would not select a woman even if she was clearly the best candidate. When the Solicitor-General sums up, perhaps she will explain which it is. Given that we Conservatives elected a woman leader of our party 34 years ago, we shall take no lectures from Labour. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher said:
	"I owe nothing to Women's lib."
	What the public think of all-women shortlists is clear. One only has to look at what happened in Blaenau Gwent. One of the safest Labour seats was lost because of the party's politically correct obsession with all-women shortlists, yet Labour still continues to ignore public opinion and press on with them. My question to all those Labour Members who say, "It's so important that we have more women in Parliament" is: will they support Conservative women candidates who stand against Labour men in marginal seats? If it is so important to have more women in Parliament, come what may, I might presume that they would. However, I suspect that they will not, because deep down they know that people's views are more important than their gender. I also want to know how many of those male MPs who bang on about wanting there to be more women MPs did so before they were elected to Parliament themselves. Frankly, I would have much more respect for many of them if they offered to give up their seat so that a woman could replace them, but of course very few of them ever do that.
	Many other measures in the Bill are either revolting or ridiculous; I do not have time to go through all of them now. However, there is one marvellous thing in the Bill that I must commend. Page E9 of the explanatory notes, which is about direct discrimination, says that "racial segregation is always" wrong. I could not agree more. I hope that that will lead to the Government making sure that people who come to this country integrate into a British way of life. I hope that it will mean an end to organisations such as the Black Police Associations, to competitions just for ethnic minorities such as the decibel Penguin prize, and to information being published in dozens of languages.
	It is not often that I quote Edwina Currie, but she summed up my attitude perfectly well when she wrote in the  Daily Mail:
	"Has she"—
	that is, the Leader of the House—
	"noticed, in her little Westminster cocoon, how many small companies, strangled by this Government's obsession with red tape, are going bust; how many ordinary men and women are losing their jobs; how many individual bankruptcies have been declared; how many homes repossessed?
	And she's wittering on about equality?
	Predictably, her fellow feminists have lined up to offer their support. In The Guardian, the headline for Polly Toynbee's column trumpeted 'Harman's Law is Labour's biggest idea in 11 years'—which just about sums up this miserable administration."
	I could not have put it better myself.

Des Browne: It is 80 years and one day precisely since Alexander Fleming's research paper "On the antibacterial action of cultures of a Penicillium" was submitted for publication in  The British Journal of Experimental Pathology. In the paper he wrote:
	"While working with staphylococcus variants a number of culture plates were set aside on the laboratory bench and examined from time to time. In the examinations these plates were necessarily exposed to the air and they became contaminated with various micro-organisms. It was noticed that around a large colony of a contaminating mould the staphylococcus colonies became transparent and were obviously undergoing lysis.
	Subcultures of the mould were made...it was found that broth in which the mould had been grown....had acquired marked inhibitory, bactericidal and bacteriolytic properties to many of the more common pathogenic bacteria.
	In the rest of this article allusion will be made to experiments with filtrates of broth cultures of this mould. For convenience and to avoid the repetition of the rather cumbersome phrase 'Mould broth filtrate' the name 'penicillin' will be used."
	Thus was born the age of antibiotics, although it was to be many years before the first practical application in treatment of bacterial infection in humans, or indeed many years before the coining of the word "antibiotics". The history tells us much about the nature of scientific discovery, the development of treatments and some of the outside factors that can influence the direction of research, development and human benefit, both positively and negatively.
	On 6 August 1881, Alexander Fleming was born at Lochfield farm, near Darvel, the youngest of eight children. He received his first schooling at Loudoun Moor school, went to the village school in Darvel at the age of 10, then two years later, continued his education at Kilmarnock academy. On 24 April this year, standing in the garden of the isolated Lochfield farm, now restored by Phillip and Heather Scott, surveying the landscape that the young Fleming had crossed daily just to get to the place of his early education, I sensed the determination to learn that must have driven him on.
	On the same day, examining the contemporary Kilmarnock academy school register, preserved with other Fleming memorabilia by Carole Ford, the head teacher, and Stephen King, the school librarian and archivist, and noting just how many of Fleming's contemporaries died prematurely of infections, I got a sense of what may have motivated his zeal for fighting those very infections.
	Any school that boasts two Nobel laureates merits a special word of public recognition. Kilmarnock academy is entitled to that boast, because of Alexander Fleming and John Boyd Orr, the Scottish teacher, doctor, biologist and politician. When Fleming was 14 he joined an elder brother in London, where after two more years of education he commenced work as a clerk in a shipping company. Four years later, a legacy enabled him to enter St. Mary's hospital medical school, Paddington, where he excelled in his studies and in numerous sports. He qualified in 1908 and, attracted by research work, entered the laboratories of Sir Almroth Wright at St Mary's, working on the nature of immunity and the treatment of bacterial infection.
	In 1909, the German chemist-physician Paul Ehrlich developed a chemical treatment for syphilis. He had tried hundreds of compounds, and the 666th worked. It was named salvarsan, which means "that which saves by arsenic". The only previous treatments for the disease had been so toxic as often to kill the patient. Ehrlich brought news of his treatment to London, where Fleming became one of very few physicians to administer salvarsan. He did so with the new and difficult technique of intravenous injection. He soon developed such a busy practice that he got the nickname "Private 606".
	That was the beginning of the age of chemotherapy of infections, with the use of salvarsan, and the beginning of Fleming's long interest in the use of chemical antiseptics in the treatment of infections, and in ways of aiding the body's natural protective mechanisms against infection. During the first world war, Fleming served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, working in a laboratory in France to study the treatment of infected war wounds. In 1921, back at St Mary's, he discovered lysozyme,
	"a substance present in the tissues and secretions of the body which is rapidly capable of dissolving certain bacteria."
	Like Fleming's discovery of penicillin, his discovery of lysozyme was the result of shrewd observation and the investigation of an unplanned event: he had a cold and observed that the drips from his nose caused lysis of bacteria where they were mixed on the culture plate. He long considered the discovery of lysozyme more important than that of penicillin.
	In September 1928, Fleming discovered penicillin when he returned from a six-week holiday and observed the classic clearing or lysis of the bacterial colonies around the contaminating mould, later identified as penicillium notatum. The irony is that modern "good laboratory practice" would probably have dictated that the old culture plates would have been disposed of long since and not left lying around for the mould to grow. The discovery was made and Fleming is reported to have remarked of his observation, "That's funny."
	Fleming was fortunate as a researcher to have had the freedom to follow up on the unexpected, and his classic 1929 paper includes an extensive study of the production of penicillin by the mould, and of its inhibitory effects against different species of bacteria. However, the crude penicillin was unstable, and Fleming's laboratory did not have the chemical expertise to purify it in its stable form for further study, so he was unable to pursue its development for clinical use. His later work with penicillin was mainly by using it for selective culture for the isolation of penicillin-insensitive bacteria for study.
	Fleming provided samples of the mould to other laboratories, including the Sir William Dunn school of pathology at Oxford. There in 1939, Howard Florey, professor of pathology, and Ernst Chain, a biochemist and refugee from Nazi Germany, began their studies with the purely academic aims of discovering the chemical nature of penicillin and its mode of action. However, they quickly became aware of its clinical potential, and the onset of the second world war brought treatment of infected wounds back into high profile.
	With the biochemist Norman Heatley, the Oxford team improvised equipment for bulk culture of the mould, and developed methods for the partial purification of penicillin. Fleming was involved in demonstrating the high potency of those penicillin preparations against cultured streptococcus and staphylococcus. By 1941, the Oxford team had purified penicillin to a stable enough form to use on a patient—an Oxford policeman dying of septicaemia. The patient improved markedly, but unfortunately the penicillin ran out, the infection strengthened and the poor man died.
	However, by 1943, Fleming was able to use penicillin successfully to treat a girl with streptococcal meningitis; the rapid cure of an almost moribund patient led him to bring penicillin to the notice of the Government. That led to the setting up of the Penicillin Committee and the production of penicillin on an industrial scale, especially in the United States.
	Fleming was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1943, knighted in 1944, and shared the 1945 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine with Florey and Chain. In 1945, Fleming was elected the first president of the new Society for General Microbiology, which was formed to provide a common meeting ground for those interested in the study of microbes of all types—bacteria, fungi and viruses and others. The society's members came from all backgrounds, including medicine, veterinary medicine, agriculture, universities, research institutes and industry.
	The society grew rapidly and still thrives today, with more than 5,000 members worldwide. Its main activities are publishing scientific journals, organising conferences, and supporting microbiology education. It is in that context that the society is sponsoring an event for school students in my constituency in November to emphasise the importance of Fleming's work in the discovery of penicillin, and how that led to an explosion in the discovery of antibiotics, which have brought tremendous benefits in terms of the control of human and animal disease. Over the years, antibiotics must have saved the lives of countless millions of human beings and animals. It is in that context that the society has offered to sponsor prizes for science in both Loudoun academy and Fleming's old school, Kilmarnock academy.
	But what of the future? How secure are we in reliance on antibiotics? The next major step after the introduction of penicillin was the discovery of streptomycin in 1943 by Selman Waksman's group. He coined the term "antibiotic" for any substance produced by a micro-organism that interferes with the growth of other micro-organisms. Unlike penicillin, which is produced by a fungus, streptomycin was produced by a bacterium. In the 1950s and 1960s, many other antibacterial and anti-fungal agents were discovered in bacteria and fungi in the so-called golden age of antibiotic discovery. In the late 1960s, US Surgeon General William H. Stewart famously stated that we could
	"close the book on infectious disease",
	and others said similar things. We now know that that is far from being the case for a number of reasons. For a start, he ignored virus diseases, which cannot be treated with antibiotics.
	Although thousands of antibiotics have been discovered, and more than 100 are currently approved for medical use, they belong mainly to a rather small number of types of chemical structure, and the rate of discovery in the golden age was followed by decades in which far fewer useful natural products were discovered. In the 1990s, drug companies invested heavily in synthetic chemistry and robotic synthesis in attempts to develop "unnatural" new drugs, and in genome sequencing of pathogens to identify genes that encode proteins not present in human cells as possible targets for newly synthesised antibiotics. Those efforts have been disappointing, and have shown little success. It appears that naturally occurring antibiotics and the interactions with their targets have been highly refined in nature over millions of years of natural selection.
	More recent methods of trying to create new types of antibiotics include the genetic manipulation of natural products by altering the biosynthetic "assembly line"; the first new products are entering clinical trials. Also, sequencing the genomes of some antibiotic-producing micro-organisms such as streptomyces has shown that there may be "sleeping" antibiotic genes, used only under special conditions infrequently encountered. However, the difficulties of commercial development of any new antibiotics are immense. First, they must be devoid of side effects, unlike new anti-cancer drugs, the drawbacks of which may be considered to be outweighed by benefits. The costs are enormous, and the end product may not be profitable. Many of the antibiotics launched in the 1940s simply would not have been brought to market in the present regulatory climate.
	The pressing need for new antibiotics and more types of antibiotics is due to the development of antibiotic resistance in the target pathogens. Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus and multi-drug-resistant human tuberculosis are only two of many examples. Bacteria have evolved over millions of years to survive the insults of their environments, and coping with the production of antibiotics by other micro-organisms has resulted in the evolution of antibiotic resistance mechanisms. Genes for antibiotic resistance have also undoubtedly been transferred between different types of bacteria in the process of horizontal gene transfer.
	If we are to maintain and expand our ability to control disease, there is a need for continued research on the fundamental biology of pathogens and their interactions with the host, and on the development of new antibiotics. We could persuade the pharmaceutical industry back to the task by re-examining some of the commercial and regulatory caveats, and develop other mechanisms for disease control such as bacteriophage therapy. The legacy of Fleming and others was the golden age of antibiotic discovery, and all the countless benefits that it brought.
	The possibility of a "post-antibiotic age", brought about by widespread antibiotic resistance in pathogenic bacteria, is scary. In the words of Roy Sleator, writing in the February edition of "Microbiology Today",
	"the bugs are fighting back! Moreover, the super-bugs...appear to be winning."